English filmmaker Andrew Haigh didn’t realize “A Long Winter” was about his own grief until after he’d already made the film.
“My dad died quite recently after ‘All of Us Strangers’ came out,” Haigh told Casey Loving at TheWrap’s studio at the 2026 Toronto International Film Festival. “I think in a weird sense, I look at ‘A Long Winter’ and think, ‘Oh, I think that is a sort of conversation with myself about that event somehow.’”
Haigh had wanted to make “A Long Winter” for roughly 20 years. He couldn’t explain at the time why it felt like the right film to make next, right after 2023’s “All of Us Strangers,” another film centered on loss and grief.
“A Long Winter” is based on the Colm Tóibín short story of the same name but moves the action from Spain to the American West in the 1950s. Fred Hechinger stars as Mike, a young man whose family falls apart after his mother disappears into a snowstorm. Caitríona Balfe, Ebon Moss-Bachrach and Kit Connor also star.
Haigh admitted that after the success of “All of Us Strangers,” he had a hard time deciding what to do next.
“It’s funny, whenever you make a film that broke through in a way some of my other films haven’t quite as much, there’s always a strange thing to know what to follow it up with,” Haigh said. “But this was a film I wanted to make for a long time, and I can’t really tell you why it felt like the exact right moment, but it did. I think you can only really tell after you’ve made the film why you made it.”
Haigh wrote a letter to Tóibín years ago, before he’d made a single feature. Tóibín invited him to the Pyrenees, a mountain range between France and Spain where the original story takes place, and the two spent time walking through the mountains together.
“I think he was just testing me out basically, and we just talked a lot about life in general more than about the story,” Haigh said. “And then he was like, ‘Yep, you can have them.’ He’s allowed me to keep them for 18 years since.”
There was a moment where production was rushing to shoot in the winter conditions, but things weren’t going to be ready in time. Hechinger said he was grateful that Haigh made the decision to push a year (it couldn’t push to spring because the weather wouldn’t right), and praised the specificity of the director’s vision.
“The way Andrew works, you just feel so supported by him, and I do feel like we would talk about the scenes in a way that was non-judgmental, but also push deeper and deeper,” he said. “There are so many plots that we’re already used to and accustomed to that are almost so familiar, and they don’t really stir up anything in you. I think Andrew and Colin are both masters at truly depicting the unique, intimate ways that we build our lives.”
He continued: “So once we started to work that way, I felt like it was the opposite of working somewhere trying to hit this one mark that we’ve already seen before. The job of each day was to get at something really precise and specific.”
In his review of the film, TheWrap’s Steve Pond wrote: “Andrew Haigh’s ‘A Long Winter’ is a slippery film, and one with a lot on its mind. It’s a family drama, a gay coming-of-age story, a survival saga, a period tale, a meditation on grief. It contains elements found in previous films by the British writer-director Haigh (‘Weekend,’ ‘45 Years, ‘All of Us Strangers’), but much of its sensibility comes from its source material, the 2006 novella by the Irish author Colm Tóibín (‘Brooklyn’), albeit transplanted from the mountains of Catalonia in Spain to the higher reaches of the Rockies in Colorado.”
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